Innovators: Fred Cohen
Fred Cohen invented the computer virus. But he also taught the world how to fight
it. In 1983, as a graduate student at the University of Southern California's
school of engineering, Cohen studied with Leonard Adleman—famously, one
of the three founding fathers of the RSA (Rivest-Shamir-Adleman) encryption. One
afternoon, in the middle of Adleman's lecture, the idea of a parasitic software
application magically popped into his head.

"I was sitting in class and suddenly said to myself, 'Aha. You can
do this,'" Cohen recalls. "I asked to do some experiments, got
permission to do them, demonstrated the feasibility of a virus, and showed how
quickly it could spread. Then I went to work on how to defend against the thing."

This became the basis for his USC dissertation, and over the next few years, he
published more than 30 journal articles on the subject. "I wrote the first
virus scanner—if you want to call it that—the first integrity checker,
and the first integrity shell," he says. "Basically, every defense
that we use today was demonstrated through my papers and experiments."

And, yes, he was the first person to use the term computer virus—at least
in print. "The term was suggested by Len Adleman," he continues, "but
I published it under my name."

Through the mid-1980s, his work went largely unnoticed. But later in the decade,
as the first real-world viruses hit PCs and mainframes, the industry sat up and
took notice. In 1989, with more than 30 known viruses in the wild and new companies
such as McAfee and Trend Micro beginning to fight them, Cohen was awarded one
of the industry's highest honors, the international
Information Technology Award. Yes, he invented the computer virus. But we can
be glad he had the idea before someone a little less, shall we say, principled.  next: The Technical Excellence Awards